The family who was attacked by a trio of teenage girls on a Manhattan train Thursday evening were enjoying the final night of their Big Apple vacation when they were viciously assaulted — and were shocked by such a random outburst of violence.
The family of four, visiting from Nevada, were riding the F train home around 8 p.m. when the teens targeted them.
“I never encountered this kind of violence, or you know, you read about in the news. I just say, ‘Oh, that’s not going to happen to me,’” the mom, Sue Young, told The Post.
“We’ve been to New York so many times as visitors, we love this city. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Young, 51, was with her husband, Ken, and their 11-year-old twin daughters on the final night of their six-week summer trip.
The family was minding their own business when Young said the girls sitting across from them began to loudly laugh at them for no apparent reason.
“All three of them were just looking directly at us. There’s no doubt about it, hard to ignore,” she said.
“So I’m looked up from my phone and then they started pointing at us. Now all three of them were pointing and then laughing even louder.”
“So I started laughing with them, doing exactly what they’re doing. Except they took offense to it, so their demeanors changed. That’s when, you know, all the insults started coming.”
As the vitriol flying from the girls heightened, concerned passengers asked the Youngs if they’d made any racial comments that sparked the assault, which the mom said she didn’t.
“The only thing I might have said was we support Black Lives Matter. Why are you doing that? Why are you so angry?” she said, adding that she did advise the girls to “stay in school.”
“It’s the same thing I say to my girls — stay in school. Do better for your life. It’s the same thing, as a motherly way — stay in school.”
Things escalated further when Young noticed a woman, Joanna Lin, 34, down the train car filming the situation — and mouthed “thank you” to her.
“I smiled at her, I said, ‘thank you,’ I mouthed the words. Because I thought if the girls realize that they’re being recorded, perhaps they will stop what they’re doing and change their behavior.”
However, it only just riled the rowdy group of teens up more.
“One of the girls stood up and went to Joanna and just punched her. I mean, punch, punch, punch, like repeatedly. I saw at least three, maybe two or three,” the mom recalled, adding that is when she decided to stand up.
“As soon as I stood up, the girl with the bleach blonde hair came up to me and she literally was an inch away from my nose saying, ‘What are you going to do b–ch?’ and started just yelling at me, over and over — ‘What are you going to do?”
The Nevada native tried to push the teen away, prompting the rest of the group to attack her.
“Well, as soon as I made contact and pushed her shoulders away, they all came after me. I backed up, but the girl in the white t-shirt came slugging at me… She grabbed my hair, I grabbed her hair, and I basically just grabbed onto her hair to shield my face because she was swinging,” Young recalled.
The 51-year-old mom’s glasses were thrown from her face and smashed underfoot, she said.
She also got a nasty bruise after her arm became wedged between two handrails while the girls shoved her in another direction.
When Young finally was thrown back onto the bench, bystanders intervened and separated the two groups.
“They like formed a human shield around us. And tried to keep us separate, and the girl in the white t-shirt spat in my hair,” Young said.
Meanwhile, the fellow straphanger who was beaten for filming the violent encounter said she would gladly do it again.
“I don’t think anyone should get away with harming people,” Lin said, explaining that she’d recently taken bystander training for situations like these.
“I know that if there’s no evidence, then nothing will happen. So I just took out my phone to film. This happens literally on a daily basis, but no one films it. So people just get away with it.”
Lin said she decided to take the training after the spike in attacks on Asian riders during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There was shouting, really aggressive, a lot of curse words to the family. I thought the two young girls were very scared. And I and I felt like it was getting louder and louder and I didn’t know — I was scared myself. I didn’t know what’s gonna happen,” she recalled to The Post.
Authorities are investigating the random attack as a potential hate crime, however, Young and her husband both insist it wasn’t racially motivated.
“[The teens] weren’t saying any racial slurs,” the mom said.
“The only comment that could have been construed as being racially related was when they yelled, ‘Go back to where you came from.’ Those were the words, not go back to your country. It was, ‘go back to where you came from.’ And that was not at the beginning of the argument.”
Young believes the trio of teens were just trying to “provoke” them.
“It’s more of just, you know, frustrated teens and they need to get their energies out in a way that was definitely not productive,” she insisted.
Her husband agreed.
“We want to say we think it was absolutely not a hate crime,” he told The Post. “It is being investigated that way because it happened to be a group of blacks who assaulted two Asian women. But we believe it was not primarily racially motivated.”
Young said she is “grateful” that a gun or knife wasn’t pulled out — and no one was seriously injured.
“Yeah, I have bruises on my arm. My scalp was super tender. I ended up with a headache for a couple of days. My neck was sore. My shoulder was sore. You know, those were strained in the hair battle,” she said of her injuries.
The teens were still at large late Tuesday.
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